College-level papers about a piece
of literature must have a thesis
sentence.To write the thesis sentence,
you can take one of two approaches: you can base the thesis on an analysis of
literary devices in the piece of literature or you can base the thesis on a
theme from the piece of literature.

A Literary-Device Thesis Sentence: First, let’s talk about writing a thesis
using literary devices.Literary devices
are character, conflict, point of view, symbolism, irony, metaphor, simile,
denotation, connotation, & etc.Remember two things about using literary devices to write an essay:(1) all pieces of literature—fiction, poetry,
drama—contain literary devices, and (2) the purpose of writing an essay about a
literary device is to help the reader understand a theme of the work.

Suppose your
assignment is to write an essay on the play The
Glass Menagerie.Here are some
possible thesis sentences using literary devices:

1.1.Tom is the protagonist of The Glass Menagerie because the
self-conflict he experiences—the rage he feels at his entrapment and the pity
he feels at leaving the others trapped—leads us to understand how the play
teaches us that sometimes any decision we make causes pain to those involved.

2.2.Laura’s glass menagerie is a symbol
both her delicate personality and of the fragile world which she shares with
her family, both of which are designed to cope with a world that can’t be
easily faced and neither of which can survive long in the real world.

3.3.Tom’s highly poetic language when he
functions as narrator contrasts with his very plain language as a character,
pointing up the split between the imaginative world of the mind and the
everyday world of the body that the characters live in but are unable to
reconcile.

Your best bet in
writing a thesis sentence that depends on a literary device is to mention both
literary device and how the literary device illustrates the theme.

Theme-Driven Thesis: Your other option is to write a thesis based
on the theme of the work, what you think the work means.Generally, this approach will lead you to
write a cause-effect essay, where you state the theme and then develop the
essay by giving the reasons why you think your statement of theme is
valid.Here are some possible thesis
sentences using theme:

1.1.In The
Glass Menagerie, we learn that we can never escape entrapment from looking
at the way Amanda is trapped by the past, Laura by her insecurity, and Tom by
his desire for adventure and love for his family.

2.2.In the play, we see that waiting for future
events to guarantee happiness is no guarantee because each of the characters
receives what she or he waited for, but none are happy with the result.

Organization and Outlining

Whether or not you
believe in outlining and whether or not you can outline, one clear fact
remains: the college essays that receive the best grades look as though they
have been outlined.Your thesis sentence
will suggest the organization of your paper.

Let’s take one of
the thesis sentences from the section above to use as our guide: Tom is the
protagonist of The Glass Menagerie
because the self-conflict he experiences—the rage he feels at his entrapment
and the pity he feels at leaving the others trapped—leads us to understand how
the play teaches us that sometimes any decision we make causes pain to those
involved.

I.Tom feels unhappiness at his entrapment.

A.A.He longs for adventure and involvement in the important events of his
time.

B.B.He feels anger at the guilt he feels for wanting to leave, focusing
that anger on his mother.

II.The guilt he feels comes from a true sense of pity for his mother and
sister who cannot escape.

A.A.He feels some pity for Amanda.

B.B.He feels even more pity for Laura.

C.C.Neither one can escape even though Tom can.

III. Tom’s conflict between these two
emotions helps us to understand one of the themes of the play: that sometimes
any decision we make has painful consequences.

A.A.Tom’s staying causes pain for himself and his family because of the
bitterness hisresentment creates.

B.B.Tom’s decision to leave

1.1.probably causes pain for his family for they
will most likely not escape and

2.2.definitely causes pain for Tom because of the
remorse he feels at having had to leave.

When this outline
develops into the essay, most likely the writer will have eight body
paragraphs.

Developing the Essay

Topic Sentences

In an essay where
each section of the paper is developed by several paragraphs, it is important
to allow your topic sentences to organize a section of the paper.What follows is a sample of how you would
write the topic sentences for the eight paragraphs of the essay:

Paragraph 1:Tom feels unhappiness at his entrapment
because he longs for adventure and involvement in the important events of his
time and de feels anger at the guilt he feels for wanting to leave, which he
focuses on his mother.

Paragraph 2:His frustration at not being able to follow
his dreams easily becomes anger at the guilt he feels for wanting to leave,
which he focuses on his mother.

Paragraph 3:His constant anger makes it hard to see, but
Tom truly is a good man who feels pity for his mother, his sister, and their
circumstances.

Paragraph 4: Though we primarily see
his pity for Amanda in his insistence as narrator that she be seen with
dignity, the pity he feels for Laura seems clear in the gentle and sympathetic
way he treats her.

Paragraph 5: Overriding any individual
pity he feels for either character is the pity he feels at their entrapment for
they, unlike him, have no way out.

Paragraph 6: Tom’s conflict between
these two emotions helps us understand one of the themes of the play: that
sometimes any decision we make has painful consequences, in Tom’s case, staying
or going.Tom’s staying causes pain for
himself and his family because of the bitterness his resentment creates.

Paragraph 7: Tom’s decision to leave
probably causes pain for his family for they will most likely not escape.

Paragraph 8: This decision to leave
definitely causes pain for Tom because of the remorse he feels at having had to
leave.

Developing the Paragraphs

In the section on outlining above, I only
outlined the essay down to the topic sentence.A common mistake that student make in writing literary analysis is
explaining too little of their logic and thoughts, assuming that the reader
knows more about the work that the writer.Yet, when the very same student sits in literature teacher’s class, she
expects the teacher to explain the work fully, without assuming that the
student understands much of anything.A
good literary analysis needs to explain in the same way, using the same sort of
logic and examples, that a student would expect a good teacher to use.

Let’s take the first
topic sentence outlined above: Tom feels
unhappiness in his entrapmentbecause
he longs for adventure and involvement in the important events of his time.Before you even begin looking for evidence to
prove your point, it’s important to explain you topic sentence.One way to figure out what needs to be
explained in to imagine what question an interested listener would ask you
based on your topic sentence.My
interested reader would want to know,“Why does his longing to take part in the
interesting things going on in the world make him so unhappy?”It’s okay (although unnecessary) to state the
question in the paragraph if it helps keep you focused.Then, based on your own understanding of the
character, without referring to anything specific in the play yet, you simply talk the answer.

Tom feels
unhappiness in his entrapment because he longs for adventure and involvement in
the important events on his time..Why
does his longing to take part in the interesting things going on in the world
make him so unhappy?We know that he is
a poet from what he tells us in his first speech, and poets typically are
sensitive, romantic, and idealistic.The
setting of the play, which Tom emphasizes, is during primarily with surviving
while Europeans, particularly the Spanish, were involved in idealistic
struggles for freedom and human rights.

Try to keep in mind
that you are the expert on what you have to say.

Paraphrases and Quotations

Having written the
topic sentence and explained it, now it is time to find evidence from the play
to back up the explanation.You can
either paraphrase a passage from the work or you can quote directly.

If you paraphrase,
you tell in your own words something specific from the work.For might want to refer to Tom’s father’s
departure in a specific way without quoting the passage directly.Thus, a paraphrase might be: Like his father before him who
was a telephone operator who fell in love with long distances, he also wants to cover long distances in
his own life.Though technically
paraphrases are a particular incident in a play; it’s much easier to supply a
general plot summary, thinking that you are paraphrasing when you are not.You are only paraphrasing if you are taking a
specific number of lines out of work and rewording them in your own voice.

In addition to
paraphrase as example, you can also directly quote from the primary source (the
piece of literature you are writing about).There are two kinds of direct quotation: block and run-in.A block quotation is used when you are
quoting more than three lines.A block
quotation (1) is indented five spaces on the left margin; (2) lacks quotation
marks; and (3) places the end punctuation before the parenthetical page
citation.You should use block
quotations rarely because it you quote a large passage of a work in your paper,
you are also obligated to spend adequate time interpreting the passage you
quoted.

A run-in quotation
is used when quoting less than three lines.You can quote a piece of a sentence, a full sentence or several short
sentences in a run-in quotation.A
run-in quotation (1) in incorporated into the text of your essay; (2) separated
from the essay with quotation marks; and (3) places the end punctuation of the
sentence after the parenthetical page citation.

You can find
examples of both kinds of quotation in the following paragraph:

Tom feels unhappiness
in his entrapment because he longs for adventure and involvement in the
important events of his time.Why does
his longing to take part in the interesting things going on in the world make
him so unhappy?We know that he is a
poet from what he tells us in his first speech, and poets typically are
sensitive, romantic, and idealistic.The
setting of the play, which Tom emphasizes, is during the 1930s when the people
of the United States,
in the middle of the Depression, concerned themselves primarily with surviving
while Europeans, particularly the Spanish, were involved in idealistic
struggles for freedom and human rights.Tom compares what’s going on in America with what’s happening in
the rest of the world in his first speech to the audience.He characterizes the Depression as a time
“when the huge middle class of America
was matriculating in a school for the blind.Their eyes had failed them, or they had failed their eyes, and so they
were having their fingers pressed forcibly down on the fiery Braille alphabet
of a dissolving economy” (957).The
language he uses suggests contempt for the ineptitude of the Americans, who
were suffering from a mess they had made themselves from their blindness and
who lacked enough awareness to realize their own mistakes and were having to be
taught, forcibly, and brutally.He says
moments later, “In Spain there was revolution.Here there was only shouting and confusion” (957).“Elsewhere, people who saw undesirable
circumstances were working vigorously to change them; here, people were too
unfocused and confused to do more than complain.Later on in the play, to the music of “All
the World is Waiting for the Sunrise,” he
contrasts once mote the imminent disaster in Europe
with the superficial coping devices around him.Commenting on the activities at the ParadiseDance Hall
across the alley, Tom notes the couples who sneak out into the alley to kiss do
so as “compensation for lives that passed like mine, without any change or
adventure” (973).Tom sees all the rest
of the world “waiting for bombardments” while those around him sedate
themselves with “hot swing music and liquor, dance halls, bars, and movies, and
sex that hung in the gloom like a chandelier and flooded the world with grief,
deceptive rainbows” (973).His desire to
join the Merchant Marines certainly comes strongly from his awareness that
changes are taking place in the world that will affect the world for years to
come.Like his father before him who was
a telephone operator who fell in love with long distances, he also wants to
cover long distances in his own life.He
wants to be a part of those changes.Ironically, of course, leaving doesn’t guarantee escape from his
entrapment.In his concluding speech, he
talks about how on can feel trapped even when running free:

I
didn’t go to the moon, I went much further....I traveled around a great
deal.The cities swept out me like dead
leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches.I would have stopped, but I was pursued by
something….Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more
faithful than I intended to be! (1000)

No matter what Tom does, he feels trapped, both by his own needs and
desires and by his love for his family.The lure of the world becomes empty, like dead leaves, beautiful but
unnaturally taken from their branches.Ultimately, Tom cannot be happy, no matter what he chooses.

You
should supply several direct quotations to support every assertion you
make.Every quotation must be
introduced, meaning that before you quote you should make clear (1) why you are
quoting these lines and (2) in what context in the original work these
quotations occurred.Ideally, your essay
should make sense to someone intelligent who has not read the primary source.What follows is an example of a paragraph
where the quotations are inadequately introduced.Unless you know the poem already, it’s a hard
paragraph to follow:

In all of these poems, the speakers are self-deceived and
deceitful.Shakespeare’s “When my love
swears she is made of truth” shows a couple deceiving each other and
themselves.They know their relationship
is based on lies.“I do believe her
though I know she lies” (2).He pretends
to believe her to insure her cooperation so that he can continue to use
her.She deceives herself and him when
the poem says, “That she might think me some untutored youth/Unlearned in the
world’s false subtleties” (2-3).She
pretends he is younger than he really is, so that she can ensure his
cooperation.They lie to each other in
order to keep the relationship together.They want to believe these lies because it keeps them happy.“Therefore I lie with her and she with me/
And in our faults by lies we flattered be” (13-14).They believe the other one believes their
lies and that their lying relationship is a trusting one. “Oh, love’s best
habit is in seeming trust” (11).Their
love comes from deceiving one another.

The mistake in this
paragraph is that the student assumes that the reader is a familiar with the
poem as the student is.Always, always, always introduce your
quotations by giving enough of the context of the work so that the reader does
not necessarily have to have read it.Here is the same paragraph with the quotations introduced more
completely:

In
all of these poems, the speakers are self-deceived and deceitful.Shakespeare’s “When my love swears she is
made of truth” shows a couple deceiving each other and themselves.They know their relationship is based on lies.In the
very first line of the poem, the speaker tells us that when his girlfriend
swears that she is faithful to him, “I do believe her though I know she
lies” (2).He pretends to believe her to
ensure her cooperation so that he can continue to use her. But he has yet an even more complicated reason for believing her lies
to him; only a very young and naďve man would believe her story, since it is
apparently so transparent, so by claiming to believe her, he presents himself
to her as younger than he really is.He
believes her lies so “That she might think me some untutored youth/
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties” (2-3).She,
of course, knows his real age, so she is pretending he is younger than he
really is, so that she can ensure his cooperation.They lie to each other in order to keep the
relationship together.They want to
believe these lies because it keeps them happy.At the end of the poem, having
made clear that the man and the women are both lying to one another and are
clearly aware that they are being lied to, the speaker sums up the ultimate
reason behind the falsehood: ”Therefore I lie with her and she with me/ And
in our faults by lies we flattered be” (13-14).Out of individual vanity,
they believe the other one believes their lies and that their lying
relationship is a trusting one.“Oh,
love’s best habit is in seeming trust” (11).Their love, as self-serving and
questionable as it is, comes from deceiving one another.

Notice how the
transition words introducing the quotation help place the quotation in the
context of the larger poem.Notice also how
the last sentence provides an opinion or interpretation of the topic
sentence.All examples must be properly
introduced.

Miscellaneous Details About
Quotation Usage and Paper Writing

1.1.Only quote the material that you need to
prove your point.You can omit
irrelevant parts of the quotation through use of the ellipsis (…).For example, “I didn’t go the moon, I went
much further….I traveled around a great deal” (1001).In fact, if you have several quotes from the
same page that fit together and that you want to use to make one point, use
ellipsis to connect them and use just one parenthetical citation for all of
them.

3.3.If you are quoting lines of poetry either
from a poem or from a verse play like Oedipus,
as a run-in quotation, you should use a slash with a space on each side (/) to
separate the lines from one another: In Julius Caesar, Anthony begins
his famous speech: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I came to
bury Caesar not to praise him.”Verse
quotations of more than three lines should begin on a new line.Add no quotation marks that do not appear in
the original.

It is in act 2 of As You Like It that Jacques is given the
speech that many think contains a glimpse of Shakespeare’s conception of drama:

All the world’s stage

And all the men and women merely
players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

Jacques
then proceeds to enumerate and analyze these ages.

4.4.Always cite page numbers at the end of prose
quotations and line numbers at the end of poetry quotations.

5.5.Always write in present tense and double
space if you type.

6.6.Always mention the title and author in the
introduction and deal with the theme at least by the conclusion.